School of Social Work News

Professor Rogério M. Pinto has been named a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor.

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, and jointly administered by the U-M National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) and the Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ODEI), the Diversity and Social Transformation Professorship is an honor designation for senior faculty who have the highest levels of achievement in demonstrating a commitment to the university’s ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion through their scholarship, teaching or service and engagement. The initial appointment is for five years and also includes special faculty fellow status at NCID.

Pinto’s research focuses on finding academic, sociopolitical and cultural venues for broadcasting voices of oppressed individuals and groups. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, his community-engaged research focuses on the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the delivery of evidence-based services (HIV and drug-use prevention and care) to marginalized racial/ethnic and sexual minorities in the United States and Brazil. Pinto also conducts art-based scholarly research.

"With this professorship, I will advance my federally-funded research on the impact of critical consciousness to abate racism, homophobia, sexism and other forms of oppression. I will specifically investigate performance and visual arts as vehicles for self-healing and social action against oppression of minoritized people," said Pinto.

Pinto is the Berit Ingersoll-Dayton Collegiate Professor of Social Work and the School’s Associate Dean for Research and Innovation.  He is also a Professor of Theatre and Drama at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. He was the recipient of the U-M Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award in 2021.

Professor Daphne Watkins’ new book, “Secondary Data in Mixed Methods Research,” has been released as part of Sage Publishing’s Mixed Methods Research Series. It is the first book to focus on the use of secondary, or existing, data in mixed methods research, and explains how to find and evaluate sources of secondary data through research design, and writing and reporting. "Writing this book was both hard work and heart work. Few scholars of color serve as thought leaders in mixed methods research, but now is the time for us to adapt traditional research approaches so that they help us serve our communities and our needs,” says Watkins. “I hope my contribution to the field will not only help scholars complete their mixed methods projects with secondary data but also inspire them to identify the gaps in our field and fill them."

Analidis Ochoa, Luke Shaefer and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor’s 2021 study on blood plasma donations and poverty was cited in the recent Washington Post article "Surviving Inflation One Plasma Donation at a Time."

Welcome, Dr. Santa J. Ono, named by the Board of Regents as 15th President-Elect of the University of Michigan. “I fiercely believe that higher education — through our scholarship, our service, and our graduates — can deliver the changes we need to build healthy, sustainable, and just communities,” he said.

Associate Professor Matthew Smith’s research is cited in a Chicago Tribune story exploring the ways to support people with autism to enter the workforce. “Virtual job training programs such as one at the University of Michigan can help fill in these gaps in training. A computerized program developed for virtual job training provided 15 practice job interview sessions of increasing difficulty. This program resulted in greater success in obtaining a job within six months, improved job interview skills and reduced anxiety about interviewing.”

Associate Professor Terri Friedline submitted written comments about the elimination of overdraft fees to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services March 31, 2022 hearing. “If private banks remain unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary for creating equal, dignified access to retail financial services, then they should step aside and enthusiastically support options such as postal banking, public banking, mission-driven Community Development Financial Institutions, and mutual aid or solidarity economy networks, which are dedicated to serving people in need without charging expensive fees and adding to burdensome debt,” she writes.

Professor Brian Perron has been invited to speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee regarding his investigation of a Russian academic paper mill. Such entities provide fraudulent services – ghostwriting, brokering authorship on accepted papers, and falsifying data–to researchers seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. Perron has identified approximately 200 papers in the published literature that have evidence of being brokered through this paper mill. His investigation led to the retraction of 30 published articles from the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, representing the largest number of retractions from a single social science journal.

“I have seen the nature of scientific publishing change so much, “Perron says. “It used to be, you identified the right journals and you knew you were competing with the best work.” Then Perron saw a blog post about people selling scholarly articles. “You find these articles in the published literature,” he says. “Some are brokered through open access journals, and there's the pay-to-publish model; with a few thousand dollars, you get any paper published you want.

“We should have stronger restrictions if somebody's getting federal funding,” he says. “There is a push to make research more widely available, and open access journals were going to solve that. We want government funded science to be more accessible, but we want to weed out the profiteers.”

“It’s exciting that lawmakers are interested in this topic,” Perron says. “You might call what I’m doing ‘citizen science.’ What I dig up is not peer reviewed. It is more like investigative journalism, like doing citizenship and science together.”

Kaitlin Ward, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Psychology, has successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Ecological Influences of Parental Discipline Behaviors and Child Outcomes among Families in Low-and Middle-Income Countries.” Her committee consisted of Shawna Lee and Andy Grogan-Kaylor.

Ward has accepted a position at Google.